Learning to Classify Documents According to Formal and Informal Style
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses an important issue in computational linguistics: classifying texts as formal or informal style. Our work describes a genre-independent methodology for building classifiers for formal and informal texts. We used machine learning techniques to do the automatic classification, and performed the classification experiments at both the document level and the sentence level. First, we studied the main characteristics of each style, in order to train a system that can distinguish between them. We then built two datasets: the first dataset represents general-domain documents of formal and informal style, and the second represents medical texts. We tested on the second dataset at the document level, to determine if our model is sufficiently general, and that it works on any type of text. The datasets are built by collecting documents for both styles from different sources. After collecting the data, we extracted features from each text. The features that we designed represent the main characteristics of both styles. Finally, we tested several classification algorithms, namely Decision Trees, Naïve Bayes, and Support Vector Machines, in order to choose the classifier that generates the best classification results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".